The Debian Installer is the official installation system for Debian. It offers
a variety of installation methods. Which methods are available to install your
system depends on your architecture.

Images of the installer for etch can be found together with the Installation
Guide on the Debian
website.

The Installation Guide is also included on the first CD/DVD of the official
Debian CD/DVD sets, at:

/doc/install/manual/language/index.html

You may also want to check the errata
for debian-installer for a list of known issues.

3.1 What's new in the installation system?

There has been a lot of development on the Debian Installer since its first
official release with sarge resulting in both improved hardware support and
some exciting new features.

In these Release Notes we'll only list the major changes in the installer. If
you are interested in an overview of the detailed changes since sarge, please
check the release announcements for the etch beta and RC releases available
from the Debian Installer's news
history.

3.1.1 Major changes

No reboot during the installation

Previously, the installation was split into two parts: setting up the base
system and making it bootable, followed by a reboot and after that the
execution of base-config which would take care of things like user
setup, setup of the package management system and installation of additional
packages (using tasksel).

For etch the second stage has been integrated into Debian Installer itself.
This has a number of advantages, including increased security and the fact that
after the reboot at the end of the installation the new system should already
have the correct timezone and, if you installed the Desktop environment, will
at once start the graphical user interface.

UTF-8 encoding default for new systems

The installer will set up systems to use UTF-8 encoding rather than the old
language-specific encodings (like ISO-8859-1, EUC-JP or KOI-8).

More flexible partitioning

It is now possible to set up file systems on an LVM volume using guided
partitioning.

The installer is also able to set up encrypted file systems. Using manual
partitioning you have the choice between dm-crypt and
loop-aes, using a passphrase or a random key, and you can tune
various other options. Using guided partitioning, the installer will create an
encrypted LVM partition that contains any other file systems (except
/boot) as logical volumes.

Rescue mode

You can use the installer to solve problems with your system, for example when
it refuses to boot. The first steps will be just like a regular installation,
but the installer will not start the partitioner. Instead it will offer you a
menu of rescue options.

Activate the rescue mode by booting the installer with rescue, or
by adding a boot parameter rescue/enable=true.

Using sudo instead of root account

During expert installations you can choose to not set up the root account (it
will be locked), but instead set up sudo so that the first user
can use that for system administration.

Cryptographic verification of downloaded packages

Packages downloaded with the installer are now cryptographically checked using
apt, making it more difficult to compromise a system being
installed over the network.

Simplified mail configuration

If the "standard system" is installed, the installer sets up a basic
configuration for the system's mail server which will only provide for local
e-mail delivery. The mail server will be unavailable to other systems
connected to the same network. If you want to configure your system to handle
e-mail not local to the system (either to send e-mail or to receive it), you
will have to reconfigure the mail system after installation.

Desktop selection

The installation system will install a GNOME desktop as the default desktop if
the user asks for one.

However, users wishing to install alternate desktop environments can easily do
so by adding boot parameters: tasks="standard,
kde-desktop" for KDE and tasks="standard,
xfce-desktop" for Xfce. Note that this will not work when
installing from a full CD image without using a network mirror as an additional
package source; it will work when using a DVD image or any other installation
method.

There are also separate CD images available that install the KDE or Xfce
desktop environment by default.

New languages

Thanks to the huge efforts of translators, Debian can now be installed in 47
languages using the text-based installation user interface. This is six
languages more than in sarge. Languages added in this release include
Belarusian, Esperanto, Estonian, Kurdish, Macedonian, Tagalog, Vietnamese and
Wolof. Due to lack of translation updates, two languages have been dropped in
this release: Persian and Welsh.

Users that do not wish to use any locale can now select C as their
preferred locale in the installer's language selection. More information on
language coverage is available at the d-i languages
list.

Simplified localization and timezone selection

Configuration of language, countries and timezones has been simplified to
reduce the amount of information needed from the user. The installer will now
guess what the system's country and timezone is based on the language selected,
or will provide a limited selection if it cannot. Users can still introduce
obscure combinations if need be.

Improved system-wide localization

Most of the internationalization and localization tasks that were previously
handled by the localization-config tool are now included in the
stock Debian installer or in packages themselves. This means that selection of
a language will automatically install packages necessary for that language
(dictionaries, documentation, fonts...) in both standard and desktop
environments. Configuration that is no longer handled automatically includes
the papersize configuration and some advanced X Windows keyboard settings for
some languages.

Note that language-specific packages will only be installed automatically if
they are available during the installation.

3.1.2 Automated installation

A lot of the changes mentioned in the previous section also imply changes in
the support in the installer for automated installation using preconfiguration
files. This means that if you have existing preconfiguration files that worked
with the sarge installer, you cannot expect these to work with the new
installer without modification.

The good news is that the Installation
Guide now has a separate appendix with extensive documentation on
using preconfiguration.

The etch installer introduces some exciting new features that allow further and
easier automation of installs. It also adds support for advanced partitioning
using RAID, LVM and encrypted LVM. See the documentation for details.

3.2 Popularity contest

The installation system will again offer to install the
popularity-contest package. This package was not installed by
default in sarge but it was installed in older releases.

popularity-contest provides the Debian project with valuable
information on which packages in the distribution are actually used. This
information is used mainly to decide the order in which packages are included
on installation CD-ROMs, but is also often consulted by Debian developers in
deciding whether or not to adopt a package that no longer has a maintainer.

Information from popularity-contest is processed anonymously. We
would appreciate it if you would participate in this official survey, helping
to improve Debian.